


All the magic I have known

by Xarybde



Series: So that each March I may gleam into leaf [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Disorder, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Neglect, Depression, Dissociation, Eating Disorders, Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Gen, Haruno Sakura: she is beauty; she is grace; she will punch you in the face, Hatake Kakashi Has Issues, Hatake Kakashi's Issues Have Issues, Hatake Kakashi: that guy who got three children dumped on his doorstep, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, No beta we die like illiterates, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Social Anxiety, Uchiha Sasuke Has Issues, Uchiha Sasuke Needs a Hug, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unreliable Narrator, Uzumaki Naruto: local disney princess, albeit a very slow-paced one, baby team 7
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27194872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xarybde/pseuds/Xarybde
Summary: ... I've had to make myself.Sasuke was always very good at disappearing.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Hatake Kakashi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto
Series: So that each March I may gleam into leaf [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974202
Comments: 137
Kudos: 297





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> Heyyyy so it's me, back on my bullshit again. Once again: please be mindful of the tags and the warnings they convey. I won't get into graphic depictions of violence, but we do get deep into the mindset of someone who is very much not alright, which can be very triggering for some. Please take care of yourselves first. 
> 
> Also, once again, I'm, like, hella projecting on our main character here, so bear in mind that none of this is a guidebook on how to deal with trauma. Also, I have plans to give this series a happy ending eventually, but bear in mind that this is the story in which we truly hit rock bottom. No one's having a good time here. 
> 
> Finally, I haven't watched and/or read Naruto in years, and honestly I can't be arsed to get back to it, so expect some serious inacurracies. For the sake of argument, let's make this an AU. It might be annoying for some of you, but I'm primarily writing this for myself, so consider yourselves warned. 
> 
> In any case, thank you so much to everyone who commented on the first installment, I didn't expect anyone to give this the time of day and you all are lovely. Have a nice day, everyone.

Sasuke goes through life haunting his apartment like a ghost.

There is a suitcase at the foot of his bed, one he’s tried to unpack, once, and only got about halfway through before he sat down and stared at the walls until the room got dark. Now, he just throws clean laundry over the pile and lets his dresser collect dust and cobwebs. It’s only fitting, after all.

He eats out of takeout boxes and one-use chopsticks, piles up the trash on the counters until he accidentally sends it sprawling and he musters the energy to clean it out. He shoves his too-small shoes into the stove, because it’s not like he even knows how to use it, anyway.

In the bathroom, he’s very careful to let the mirror fog up with steam before using the sink to brush his teeth. He uses the same soap for his hair and body, and that might be why the former is such an untameable mess, but he can’t bring himself to care. He thought about having it cut, one, but the thought of scissors gleaming silver-bright anywhere near his face had made him break out in a cold sweat and vomit whatever lunch he managed to choke down into the toilet. He settles on cutting it himself, which might not have been his brightest idea, considering he doesn’t own scissors and so he had to use a kunai, and he still refuses to look at himself in the mirror.

For the next few weeks, he entertained the thought that people were staring at him not because he was The Last Uchiha (the capitalization, he learned, is important), but simply because he looked ridiculous. It was… well, not a _nice_ thought, per se, because there was still the low-burn of shame and humiliation at the back of his throat ( _you will not walk out here and bring dishonor to our Clan, boy_ ), but it wasn’t really any worse than the usual, so all in all he marked the whole operation a tentative win.

But most of the time, he trains.

He teaches himself to throw kunai and shuriken with deadly accuracy, building himself an obstacle course in the little corner of the woods he has claimed as his. He borrows taijutsu scrolls from the library and works through them indiscriminately – still slow, so achingly slow, because he is six, eight, and still a failure in every way that matters. He pays special attention to the moves geared towards taking out bigger opponents, stronger opponents, faster opponents, because Sasuke is many things but delusional about his abilities is not one of them.

On weekends, he goes out before the sun rises and walks through the forest with soundless steps, teaching himself to be quick, to be silent, to be invisible. He manages to sneak on a wildcat once, getting so close he could make out the green threads in its tawny eyes, could have reached out and touched it, and he allowed himself a moment of elation before melting back into the trees.

He gets so good at not being seen he can sometimes go through an entire shopping trip without anyone noticing him, taking what he needs and slipping the money into the shopkeepers’ pocket without anyone the wiser. It’s perhaps a little pathetic, the sense of liberation that brings him, but Sasuke has few victories, in those days, and those he has he holds them close to his chest.

The years pass and Sasuke feels weightless, like he’s a jellyfish bobbing along to the current rather than a person. The world feels unreal, off-kilter, like he’s seeing it from behind a dirty window pane. He watches emotions bloom across his classmates’ faces and knows they should be familiar, but all he feels is dull and hollow and tired, so very tired.

He should be angry, he knows. Sometimes, he is, when it’s the dead of the night and he cannot sleep. Only then, when everything is dark and shrouded, do the emotions burst forth. He feels :like a raw, exposed nerve, then, furious and despairing and terrified, an eye-searing palette of emotions that makes him grind his teeth against a scream. He wants to hurt, in those moments, anything, everything, and he tears his covers to shreds with stiff fingers, slams his head against the headboard until he’s dizzy and choking, carves bloody lines up his arms with his fingernails. Then he falls asleep, exhausted, and wakes up empty, like his anger scooped out everything that made him human and devoured it whole.

Sasuke trains unil he drops and sits through class with his back ramrod-straight and cotton in his ears. He picks at his scabs and pads through life on pale feet. He doesn’t eat nearly enough and doesn’t watch himself shrink down and get bony and grey and sharp. (There are more than one way to make yourself disappear.)

He is the pride of his village and a wraith of a boy, he is a hardworking student and a spectre, ghosting through the corridors, he is the last member of a founding Clan and a jellyfish, bobbing along the shore, he is angry and tired and nothing at all –

And then, he’s a Genin.


	2. Genin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhhh I hate this chapter but I'm sick and tired of looking at it, so here, you can have it. Have some baby Team 7, Kakashi being terrible with children, and Sasuke being his usual disaster self. Also subtitled: "Some of you have never been the disappointingly less gifted younger child, and it shows."
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who commented. You guys rock. I can't stress enough how much it means to me that somehow, somewhere, someone took enjoyment out of my silly story.

Sasuke is on Team 7 for about twenty minutes before he decides it will all be an unmitigated disaster.

In his defence, he does make a good attempt at envisioning it. Naruto’s loud and generally obnoxious, but he does manage to give their Chuunin instructors the slip pretty regularly, so he has to be more than decent at stealth in order to get away while wearing so much bloody orange. He also almost blew up the classroom once because he overloaded a seal with chakra, something that shouldn’t even be possible, so that means he has a lot of it, even if he’s pants at controlling it right now. Sakura would balance him out nicely; Sasuke thinks she’s probably pretty average when it comes to chakra reserve, but her control is the best of the class by far. She’s… well, meek, for lack of a better word, and sometimes lacks understanding on the basic principles of shinobi life (because of her civilian background, probably, which is no fault of her own but still potentially a problem), but she’s also _smart_ , under all that veneer. Book-smart, for now, sure, but there’s something there. Sasuke’s seen her spar with some of their yearmates when she’s particularly pissed off. That girl is _mean_.

And Sasuke is… not particularly good at anything, really, but he gets by. And he’ll have the Sharingan, one day, he supposes, so that’s an asset. One which means their sensei is unlikely to be a slouch, considering how much Konoha values its very last Uchiha. (Two days later, Sasuke will think back on this particular train of thought and laugh himself sick.)

Tragically, reality reasserts itself swiflty, in the form of Sasuke’s own inability to act like a normal person. Case in point:

“I look forward to working together, Sasuke-kun!”, Sakura breathes out excitedly. Sasuke does his best not to flinch, because he doesn’t think that’s a thing a teammate is supposed to do. But he can’t help the shiver of revulsion that goes through him at the open adoration on Sakura’s face, the one sported by many girls his age – the one that means that they’re thinking about how much of a prize The Last Uchiha (patent pending) would be to snatch up. It’s not even about him, not really, because Sasuke knows what he is like. He wears his silence like a cloak, his churlishness like a shield. He can’t talk to anyone without choking up, and he’s prone to bouts of moodiness that can last weeks. He can’t be anything to look at, either, with his stupid hair and skinny hands and bruised knees. It could have been anyone, should probably have been anyone but him, because it’s about prestige. Marrying into a powerful clan is a lifetime pass to peacock around town; becoming the by default matriarch of said clan would be like declaring oneself king of the peacocks.

… Stupid comparisons aside, joke’s on them. Sasuke’s broke.

It’s not that Sasuke doesn’t get it, because he does. People crave power because it gives them control, and he’s not about to cast stones when he’s doing the exact same thing, when it comes down to it. It’s just that it makes him feel like a piece of meat at the market, on display for everyone to gawk at, and there are very few things he despises more than the market.

So. Sakura. Sasuke winces when he realizes the time for him to answer has long since passed, and she’s looking quietly downtrodden while Naruto glowers in the background. He bites the inside of his mouth to keep himself from saying anything stupid, like “please stop looking at me”. It’s been a long time, he realizes, since he has… well, talked to anyone for more than a few sentences. (He knows since when. He carefully doesn’t think about it, because this is the middle of the day, and files the thought away for a future breakdown.)

His teammates move onto setting up a prank for their now rather late teacher. Well, Naruto does the setup while Sakura pretends not be be delighted by his daring. Sasuke hides his hands in his sleeves and worries at his fingernails. He should buy a nail cutter. Probably. Maybe.

A long time passes. Sasuke doesn’t really notice it, used as he is to losing large stretches of time, but his teammates do. He wonders if they’re scared, too. If they, too, are torn between the desire to run forward and bury themselves in one spot and hide forever.

Probably not. Probably it’s just Sasuke.

Their jounin-sensei shows up as both Sakura and Naruto’s stomach start to growl rather insistently. He gets caught up in Naruto’s trap, which is perhaps more of surprise than it should be. Naruto is rather infamous for his pranks; even someone as detached as Sasuke knows that. He proceeds to tell them he hates them all, which… yeah.

Can’t blame the guy, really.

On the roof, they go through their introductions. Their sensei doesn’t reveal anything at besides his name, which Sasuke uncharitably thinks is rather predictable coming from the man hiding behind a mask, of all things, Naruto is loud and enthusiastic, and Sakura is subdued and sending Sasuke looks that makes him want to crawl out of his skin.

Then, it’s his turn. He knew it was coming, but he still somehow manages to draw up a blank.

Words, boy.

“My name is Uchiha Sasuke”, he intones out carefully, because he is an Uchiha and Uchihas don’t stutter. “I like tomatoes”, he blurts out without thinking. yes. Tomatoes. Nice, inoffensive tomatoes. He does like them. Not because of how they taste, really, but because they’re one of those vegatbles that don’t need to be peeled nor cooked before eating, therefore making them ideal on the days Sasuke likes to pretend he has a balanced diet. Or a diet at all, really. “I dislike the market”, he continues, holding onto an earlier train of thought. “And my goal in life is to kill…” _Don’t say you plan on committing fratricide in front of the civilian and the orphan_ , he thinks in a sudden, and rare, flash of clarity. “A certain person.”

Done. There you go, wasn’t so hard, wasn’t it?, he tells himself, but he can feel the growing lump in his throat and the sharp pain where his fingernails dug into his palms. He really needs to cut those. When he looks up, Kakashi-sensei looks carefully bored in a way that betray he’s paying pointed attention to _something_ , Naruto looks torn between offense and disgust, and Sakura is looking at him like he’s a puppy left on the side of the road on a rainy night. His nails break the skin beneath them. Sasuke wants nothing more than to throw them all off this bloody roof, himself included.

The stone of the shrine is dark and slick with rain. Sasuke’s bare feet leave an imprint on the steps for a few seconds before the water washes it away again. He sits down.

He doesn’t go inside the shrine. He never can. It might have might childish, superstitious fear, at first, that seeing the rows and rows of names carefully etched into the stone would make it more real, somehow.

It’s different, nowadays. Now there is shame blending into the pain, at the thought of cobwebs stretching their way across the hollow hall, reminding him that he’s still weak, so weak, and their murderer runs free.

Sasuke used to sit on those steps and wish he could melt into the stone; wished, silently, shamefully, that he had died alongside his kin. Maybe, then, he would have died with a shred of dignity to his name.

Now, he sits with his back to the shrine, watching the bustle across the river where the compound used to be, and thinks: _soon_.

This is the thought that lulls him to sleep, here, in the place closest to home he will ever have. It will all be over soon.

Waiting for Kakashi-sensei with the other two members of Team 7 is… uncomfortable, to say the least. The both of them squirt around Sasuke as if he’s a wild animal they’ve suddenly discovered has rabies, and Sasuke can’t be bothered to try and mend the gap. He’s tired, in a bone-deep kind of way that speaks to more than one night spent sleeping on stone stairs. So they don’t like him. Big deal. Sasuke doesn’t like himself much either.

He went back to his apartment to change and resupply, but didn’t eat. It wasn’t hard. he doesn’t eat a lot anyway. But Sakura and Naruto are clearly bothered by it, even more so as their sensei draws late, and Sasuke distantly wonders if this is meant as some sort of preliminary training in learning how to endure starvation.

The sun is high in the sky by the time Kakashi-sensei shows up. Sasuke shakes off his thoughts as the other two round up on their teacher for his lateness. He wonders, a little tiredly, how it feels to have enough energy to be so loud about _everything_.

The test, as Kakashi explains it, is clearly set up to be a trap. It’s a mean one, too, because Sasuke comes from shinobi stock and knows Genin teams come in threes, but Sakura and Naruto don’t.

Instinct has kicked in and he’s hiding in the trees before he can wonder if he’s meant to share this bit of information. He thinks he should. Intel can be vital to the success of a mission, and they do need to do at least a passable job of working like a unit, after all.

He nods to himself decisively. Mind made up, he creeps out of his perch and in search of his wayward teammates.

He finds Naruto buried neck-deep in the ground. For a moment, he can only blink slowly at the scene, the other boy swearing up a storm as he tries to wiggle out of his prison.

“Did you really try to take on Kakashi-sensei on your own?”, Sasuke blurts out without thinking. Naruto freezes, looking up and spotting him after a few moments. Slow. Way too slow.

“What’s it to you, teme? Think I can’t take him? You just watch – once I get out of here, I’m going to get the bells, not you!” The last bit is all but snarled out, and Sasuke rears back in shock and – ah, yes, a little bit of hurt. Sasuke knows he’s not the person he would have picked for a teammate, either, but he didn’t realize he was so objectionable as to merit this kind of outright hostility.

Sasuke pretends the lump in his throat is from vexation rather than the sharp sting of rejection, and leaves the boy to his struggle. He can get out of the trap on his own. He clearly didn’t want his help anyways.

Sakura is a bit harder to find, but only in that she’s not broadcasting her presence by shouting at the top of her lungs. In fact, she’s unconscious.

For a heart-stopping moment, Sasuke thinks she’s dead. Her hair is spilling out on the forest floor in rivulets, her face white as a sheet. Sasuke bites clean through the inside of his cheek. Her hair isn’t dark, this isn’t the compound, and, most importantly, she’s breathing. It’s a training exercise. Kakashi wouldn’t. He _wouldn’t_.

(But then again, you thought that of Itachi, too, didn’t you?)

Sasuke carefully peels back one of her eyelids. Her eyes are rolled back, twitching irregularly. Genjutsu. A nasty one, if it was enough to knock her unconscious. But there’s nothing sitting there and feeling bad about it can do, so Sasuke just adjusts her until she lies on her side, making sure she won’t make up with a nasty crick in her neck.

Then, he’s off again.

If one is operating under the assumption that Kakashi is picking them off one by one, then he’s probably next. Sasuke can aknowledge, if only privately, that going off on their own was rather stupid, when faced with an overwhelmingly powerful opponent like a Jounin. He doesn’t think they really had a chance to get the bells even then, not really, because, once again, getting up-close and personal with a _Jounin_ , enough said. But they might have _survived_.

Sasuke can feel the taste of failure rising like bile at the back of his throat, but he pushes it down. He’s not dead yet. He can make it count.

When Kakashi steps into the clearing, book firmly in place in front of his face, he’s greeted by a volley of kunai aimed at his legs (not the head – everyone always expects the head). It’s infuriating, the way he jumps out of the way of every trap nimbly, like he’s just a regular passerby out on his morning stroll. He’s trying to annoy him into attacking for real, Sasuke realizes with a start.

Sasuke doesn’t. He stays hidden, crouched low in the underbush, and darts away as soon as Kakashi has his back to him.

This process repeats itself several times. After his third time walking into an empty clearing, Kakashi starts to look distinctly annoyed. The fourth time, he speaks up: “Are you really that scared, Sasuke? I thought you were supposed to be the best in your year. Well. Guess the standards really _are_ slipping, huh?”

Sasuke almost laughs. The insult would be more effective, he thinks, if it wasn’t something he told himself almost every single day. It stings, of course it stings, because having someone else aknowledge your flaws never feels good, but it doesn’t make him angry.

Are you scared?, Kakashi asked, and yes. Of course he is. Every second of every hour of every day, he’s scared. That’s not _new_. Sasuke’s scared because he knows he is weak. Because he knows his brother was, is, better in every conceivable way, and Sasuke could train and study for a hundred years without making a dent in their disparity.

Sasuke’s not smart, like Sakura, or strong, like Naruto. His brother is both. Sasuke is none of those things. This is a truth he has known about himself for a long time. Kakashi’s words were aimed at his pride, and that wasn’t a bad guess, really, because the Uchiha were prideful before anything else, but Sasuke is just himself, and the only strength he has is being prepared.

So he doesn’t take the bait, and the next time a wire snaps out, Kakashi’s hand shoots out at it. The trap it was meant to trigger barely summersaults, then starts falling down limply. Sasuek grins.

Kakashi looks down at his hand in surprise. Sasuke can see the fabric of his glove is torn, and there’s a hit of red beiong swallowed by the dark fabric. Because he’s looking for it, he can see kakashi school his face into careful boredom, calling out: “Barbed wire, now, Sasuke?” A pause, and he sniffs at his wound, looking, for all but a moment, honestly surprised. “And poison! Why, aren’t you the crafty one!”

That doesn’t stop him from grabbing Sasuke into a chokehold before he’s even finished his sentence, but Sasuke will take the victories he can get. (He made him _bleed_.)

In the end, they get the smack talk of the century, Naruto gets tied to a tree, and Kakashi leaves. Sasuke grits his teeth against the anger rising in his gut. that means one more year at the Academy. One more year to go until he can get strong enough to confront his brother. (One more year to walk the streets his family had walked, and feel, keenly, the negative space where they should be.)

If some people wield their anger like a knife, Sasuke thinks, Sakura wields hers like a jackhammer. There’s a tremor in her hands that belies the fact that she is truly shaken, instead of simply aggravated like she’s pretending to be. Sasuke leaves her be. He has no right to tell her how to deal, with his own track record. Naruto, on the other hand, has been looking quietly miserable ever since getting tied to the tree. They hadn’t eaten that morning, Sasuke remembers. Most people aren’t used to go so long without food.

He looks down at his own lunch. Kakashi explicitely forbid it, but Kakashi also put Sakura under a genjutsu violent enough to shake her bravado, so Kakashi can shove it.

He doesn’t feel sympathy for his teammate, Sasuke tells himself firmly. He simply has bad experiences with Genjutsu, and he doesn’t wish to learn under someone who would use such a tool so carelessly. that’s all.

Also, he’s not hungry.

“Here”, Sasuke grunts, shoving his chopsticks in Naruto’s face. Both his teammates look comically surprised, and he scowls at them. Sure, it’s embarassing to be hand-feeding his teammate, but they need to be practical. If they’re to have a second chance, they will need to be at full strength, and while Sasuke is used to operating on very little food, Naruto clearly isn’t.

But Sasuke doesn’t have it in him to deliver a speech, so he just glowers at the other boy until he accepts the food. Thankfully, he does. Good to know he doesn’t think everything Sasuke touches is diseased.

Sasuke pointedly refuses to aknowledge the fact that he’s still smarting from his earlier remark. It’s ridiculous. He’s not a child trying to make his first friend at school, for God’s sake.

They pass. Somehow. Kakashi’s logic is beyond him – Kakashi-sensei, now, he supposes, although the title feels like ash on his tongue. Sasuke knows himself. It will take him a very long time to forget Kakashi looking at him and saying: _you are lesser than_.

He goes home. Cuts up some tomatoes for dinner. Puts the TV on, because he still hasn’t grown out of the habit of pretending to do normal people things in the hope that it will stick, somehow. He puts off going to sleep for as long as he can, because he knows what’s waiting for him there. Or at least, he thinks he knows.

He falls asleep in a tight bundle on his couch with the blue light of the telly making the world eerie and beautiful. In sleep, the sharp angle of the kitchen becomes the sleek curve of the river.

It’s a sunny day. Izumi has her pants rolled up to her thighs, wading in the river, laughing as she held her brother’s hair tie high over her head, like a banner unfurling in the wind. Upstream, Shisui is sitting cross-legged on a rock, egging them both on, his hair wet and pushed back, curling around his ears like vines.

It’s the tenderness of the scene, he will think later, that made the dream especially cruel. it had been a beautiful day. His brother and cousins had whisked him away before the adults woke up, and it had made him feel so warm, then. The skin of his hands had still been raw and pink from his latest attempt at a katon jutsu.

Sasuke turns, and Itachi smiles down at him. He’s wearing swim trucks with little purple ducks on them. He looks ridiculous. Shisui got them for him as a joke. He hadn’t anticipated that Itachi’s fashion sense was _actually_ that bad. Sasuke liked counting the ducks. Itachi would let him, most of the time.

“Come on, I’ll show you something”, his brother says, and Sasuke laps up the attention eagerly, like he always does. Itachi whips up a kunai from somewhere. Its edge glints steel-blue in the sunlight, like an oil spill.

“I know how to throw kunai!”, Sasuke all but pouts. His brother chuckles, reaching over to ruffle his hair. Sasuke likes to pretend he hates it, but he doesn’t. Itachi never touches him with the intent to hurt.

“Not like this you don’t”, Itachi replies, and he fits Sasuke’s chubby fingers around the handle neatly. He’s still smiling. His hand is warm and alive around Sasuke’s own.

“This is how you do it, Sasuke”, he says, and forces Sasuke’s hand to plunge the kunai into his chest.

Above them, the birds chirp on. 


	3. Team 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sasuke does his best impression of a normal person, Kakashi follows suit, and neither of them are excessively successful.

If Sasuke doesn’t have much in common with the other two members of his team, the three of them, at least, all abhor D-ranks with equal fervor.

Naruto was the first one to protest, well, pretty much immediately. And loudly. All the way through the first week. Sasuke might have contemplated murder more than a fair few times during those days, but even he had to admit the orange eyesore could give a mean screech. He’s still not sure how useful that bit of information about his teammate is, but he files it away all the same.

After their day off on Sunday – which Sasuke spent hiking through a blissfully quiet forest and dogging the steps of what he thought might have been a lynx, though he never caught up to it – he contemplated the hope that, perhaps, Naruto had used this time to quietly resign himself to this situation. Or at least had settled for seething in silence.

Instead, it got worse, because _Sakura_ got involved.

Sasuke’s not sure why he ever thought she was the calm, sensible one. It turns out that there isn’t a calm _or_ sensible one in Team 7, because on day eight of doing D-ranks, her temper started visibly fraying. The angrier she got, the more outwardly cloyingly sweet she became, until almost all of her sentences were hissed through gritted teeth.

Kakashi, of course, seemed to find their attempt at browbeating (Naruto) and charm (Sakura) him into giving them more interesting missions absolutely hilarious. Not that it was easy to tell, what with the mask and the fact that the man’s body language seemed perpetually set on “vaguely bored”, but Sasuke grew up with _Shisui_. He knows a well-hidden chortle when he sees one.

This is not to say that Sasuke was above his teammates’ annoyance; he wasn’t. He was aching and aggravated and all of those things Naruto and Sakura no doubt felt, and, above all, he couldn’t help the sinking sensation that he was wasting his time babysitting when he could be _training_. He just went about this problem in a vastly different way.

Back when – back when the Uchiha clan still existed, they used to keep cats. Some were summons, but most were regular stray cats that wandered in one day and stayed for the fish and the ear scritches. Sasuke, at age four, had _adored_ the cats. It had broken his heart to find out the feeling wasn’t mutual, because cats were cats and he was a loud, sticky human child trying to pet their belly.

It was Aunt Akira – with her hooked nose and two missing fingers on her left hand – that showed him how to get the cats to like him back. She had him sit down beside her on the steps behind her house, and he polished her kunai while she sharpened her sword. After a while, she started speaking with a low voice about all the subtle differences between different kinds of swords, and Sasuke had listened intently, enraptured; so enraptured he completely forgot about the big tabby cat he had been trying to charm for weeks now, and whom he only noticed when it plopped on his crossed knees, looking anywhere but at him.

Sasuke had been so dumbstruck his Auntie had laughed out loud, a graceless, cawing sound that made her look considerably younger, somehow. The cats, she told him, were inquisitive and selfish creatures. The only way to hold their attention was to discard theirs.

And so, Sasuke started ignoring Kakashi.

Oh, nothing overt. Nothing that would be anywhere near _rude_. But where he would have tried to wiggle his way into the man’s good graces, had he been slightly less aloof, he now treated him the way he would treat any passerby on the street. With the blank disinterest of someone who had no particular care nor stake in any matter regarding him. It was an insult, if a subtle one, one that meant: _you have nothing to teach me_. For a ninja of Kakashi’s caliber, this was bound to smart.

The days went by. By the two-weeks mark, Naruto and Sakura had settled on vaguely occult-sounding mutterings whenever Kakashi or a D-rank was on the horizon. A few days later, Sasuke managed to start emitting a grunting sound upon meeting every morning that could probably make a passable greeting, if one was deaf, dumb, and didn’t speak any known language.

That was, pathetically enough, progress.

Naruto caught on that Sasuke was practicing one-handed sign whenever he had a hand free, and started copying him, albeit clumsily. Sakura noticed quickly afterwards, and launched another round of arguing because Naruto, according to her, rotated his wrists all wrong. She was right.

It was better, he found out, to assign Sakura and Naruto in tasks that would pitch them against each other, rather than force them to cooperate; their pride fuelled them in the first scenario, whereas it only hindered them in the second. He learned the distinct patern Naruto’s voice took when he was preparing for a screech, and the way Sakura’s mouth started twitching when the urge to hit something got too strong to contain, and was therefore mostly out of range when the storm invariably, inevitably, hit.

Sasuke still wanted to murder them, but it was only most of the time, now. He felt like a sailor, manning his boat on the oceanic battlefield between two behemoths. There was a sense of calm, he found, in continually steering himself towards the eye of the storm.

Perhaps it isn’t quite teamwork, but it's _something_.

It’s about three weeks after Team 7’s formation that Kakashi’s curiosity finally gets the better of him.

The mind-numbing task of the day, according to a way-too-cheerful Chuunin at the mission desk, reclining in his blessedly air-conditioned office like a king upon his throne, was painting a picket fence for one Mr. Kobayashi, an old man whose hunched back and wrinkled neck made him look vaguely like a turtle. Paint work would normally have been on the more tolerable side of D-ranks, as it didn’t involve mud, the market, or screaming infants. If Naruto and Sakura sometimes decided to fling the paint at each other instead, well, it’s not like Sasuke was too attached to his clothes, anyway.

But that would have been on an ordinary day. On that particular day, however, Konohagakure was shouldering its most sweltering heat wave in about twenty or so years, according to anyone who had been around for that long, and what should have been an easy mission turned into a miserable affair for everyone foolish enough to be involved.

Sasuke would have thought the heat would make him feel snappish and irritated, and it did, for a while, until the monotony of the task made him settle into quiet misery. He can feel his hair sticking to the back of his neck, and wonders dazedly if he could get away with shaving it all off.

Sakura and Naruto have settled at two other corners of the yard, working their way counterclockwise. And because Sasuke has come to term with the fact that he’s on a team of lunatics, they seem cheerfully unaffected by the temperature. On the contrary, they seem _delighted_ by it. 

For the first time in his life (but sadly not the last), Sasuke seriously considers calling an exorcist.

From behind the safety of his window, Mr. Kobayashi is lounging on his armchair, looking smugly beatific, and sips on a large cup of iced tea. It’s probably filled with the tears of the innocent Genin he gets off on tormenting. 

Sasuke is working on his chakra control whilst dutifully painting his side of the fence – because he’s an Uchiha and he’ll be damned before being caught half-assing anything, dreadfully asinine D-ranks included – when Kakashi makes his move.

“Have you figured out your chakra nature yet?”, the man asks boredly. Sasuke looks up, and has to restrain a violent twitch when he sees the man, book firmly wedged in front of his face, crouching on the fence. On his _freshly-painted_ fence.

A cat, he reminds himself, and carefully doesn’t scream. Instead, he dips his brush into the paint pot, carefully squeezes out the excess on its lip, and keeps painting the lower edge of his section as he answers a succint: “It’s fire.”

Kakashi-sensei daintily turns a page, and makes a low hum of aknowledgement. He looks way too cheerful for a man essentially covered in black from the eyes down. In the middle fo a sunny yard. During a heat wave. “Is it, though?”, he says, his voice a study in casual disinterest Sasuke is quickly learning means he’s making fun of him, and not bothering to hide it.

“I’m an _Uchiha_ ”, Sasuke answers slowly, caught somewhere between bafflement and offence. He tries to focus on the indignation. It’s easier to talk, when anger blurs the world at the edges. “Uchihas always have fire.”

“I’m sure they do”, Kakashi replies in a condescending tone. Sasuke adds it to his mental spreadsheet as “you’re an idiot but I’ll indulge you”. Sasuke, coincidentally, tries very hard not to chuck his bucket of paint at the man. He’s gearing up for some kind of response – something appropriately biting – when Kakashi looks up from his stupid fucking book and makes the corner of his lone eye crinkle in a facsimile of a smile: “So why don’t you show me?”

This brings Sasuke short. “You’ve seen my katon before”, he says slowly, squinting up at him. He’s pretty sure he’s used it in spars. Unless their sensei was quite literally sleeping with his eyes open, he couldn’t have missed it.

“Indulge me”, Kakashi-sensei says blandly, and chucks a leaf of paper at him. Sasuke catches it, making a face. He’s never done a test with chakra-conductive paper before, mostly because there was no _point_ , but he knows how they work. Just a bit of chakra through his fingertips, and it should crumble into ash –

“Huh”, Kakashi says. “That’s what I thought.”

 _How in the ever-loving fuck did you come to this conclusion_ , Sasuke would ask, if he wasn’t too busy looking at a piece of paper like it single-handedly heralded the apocalypse.

Because it sat there in his hand – hopelessly wrinkled, but intact.

“Kakashi-sensei”, Sasuke starts with all the composure he can manage. He is of the most noble and ancient clan in Konoha. He will not lose his calm over a sheet of paper.

His teacher makes a noise of aknowledgement. “What are the chances your paper is defective?”

“Close to nonexistent”, he replies, cheerful now.

What were the chances that _Sasuke_ would be defective?

Sasuke doesn’t voice this thought aloud, however, because he’s not an idiot. Instead, he opts to glare at his jounin-sensei, who has put away his book in favor of staring at the spectacle that is Sasuke’s life. In the background, Naruto has somehow lost his shirt, and is saying something to Sakura with a frankly unnerving amount of gesticulating.

“Think about it like this”, Kakashi-sensei says with shameless delight. Sasuke mentally translates it to _Eat shit and die, you sucker_. “You’re now very close to mastering your second nature transformation!”

Sasuke does chuck the bucket of paint at him, this time.

Mr. Kobayashi sends them off with a disapproving cluck and a glare. Sasuke thinks it might have been the wasted paint, but it also could be that Naruto is still walking around with his tits out. Sasuke absently pushes his hands in his pockets, and freezes when he’s met with the unexpected crinckle of paper.

It’s the piece of chakra-conductive paper Kakashi had him use. Two identical pieces of paper have been stapled to the first, and on it somebody – Kakashi, who else? – wrote:

_Go to team dinner tonight._

Followed by a mildly horrifying drawing that Sasuke thinks might be supposed to be a face. Or maybe a dog?

A few feet away, Naruto and Sakura are bickering about something. Sasuke doesn’t mean to feel jealous, but he abruptly does. As antagonistic as it can be, his two teammates have clearly fallen into some kind of rapport. Sasuke is just – sort of _there_. Bobbing along, like a jellyfish.

And it’s stupid, because he doesn’t even want friends, not really. Friends mean letting people close, letting them tie him down to this earth, and Sasuke – can’t. Can’t do that again. His life follows a list of bullet points that lead him down to his brother. He’s not even a real person anymore. It wouldn’t be fair.

So Sasuke inches backwards, and would have made a run for it had the other two not suddenly resolved their argument, and turned towards him in eerie synchronicity.

“Teme!”, Naruto all but bellows. Sasuke freezes, taking stock of what weapons he has on him. Sakura pointedly steps on their teammate’s toes before he can – lunge at Sasuke’s throat, or whatever he was planning on doing. Her smile is wide and plastic. “Sasuke-kun”, she says in a much more measured tone. To her credit, there’s only a hint of a squeal in her voice. “How do you feel about the three of us grabbing dinner tonight? It would be nice getting to know each other more outside of missions!”

Sasuke blinks carefully. She looks nervous, but honest enough, so she’s probably not planning on poisoning him. Naruto looks mutinous, but not much more than usual, so that’s – something. He shouldn’t try to bash Sasuke’s skull in over the dinner table. Probably. Hopefully.

Sasuke is still about to bail, because he feels sticky and frazzled for reasons he doesn’t care to name, and signing up for an entire evening of interacting with people honestly sounds like torture. Which is precisely when he remembers the three pieces of paper in his pocket – two of which are meant for his teammates.

He closes his eyes. Goddamit.

“Sure”, he croaks out from behind the safety of his eyelids. He hears Sakura’s surprised intake of breath, and for a second he thinks, cruelly, _shouldn’t have invited me if you didn’t want me to accept_ –

But that’s unfair. It’s not their fault Sasuke is unlikeable.

Sakura recovers her composure as Naruto clamors for ramen. She tries to give him a slap upside the head, shrieking that they should let Sasuke choose –

“Well then, what _do_ you want to eat, huh?”, Naruto somehow manages to ask from where Sakura has him in a headlock. Sasuke hesitates. He doesn’t have any particular preferences, but…

“It’s too hot for ramen”, he points out, and winces. He didn’t mean for it to come out so flat.

Naruto looks like he’s just announced that he regularly kills small, fluffy animals for ritualistic purposes. “It’s _never too hot for ramen_ ”, he declares fervently, like a devout at the altar. Sasuke starts inching backwards again.

“Sushi!”, Sakura shouts. They both turn to her. Well, Sasuke turns; Naruto has to settle for awkwardly craning his neck backwards, still stuck in her grip. “How does sushi sound?”

Sasuke makes a noise he thinks sounds agreeable, and even Naruto, after some pointed shaking, mutters a reluctant agreement.

The place Sakura leads them to is small but obviously well-kept. Naruto receives some glares (he still hasn’t put his shirt back on), but they’re let in without further issue. His teammates move to sit on the terrace, at which point Sasuke puts his foot down and forecefully herds them towards the corner of the room closest to the AC.

“You really don’t like the heat, dontcha?”, Naruto comments. It’s not really a question, so Sasuke just shrugs and flicks the menu open.

Conversation is slow to pick up. Naruto and Sakura have long realized they would need to fill the bulk of any conversation with Sasuke, but that doesn’t make it any less awkward for all parties involved.

“My aunt works here”, Sakura says. “Well, not tonight, but usually.”

“She’s a cook?”, Naruto asks.

“Oh no, she’s a server. She’s saving up to go to college in the capital.”

“That means she’s really smart, isn’t it?”

“I… suppose, yes? She wants to be an architect.”

“She _is_ smart, then! Do you have a lot of family?”

“I don’t really know my mum’s family, but my dad has a lot of cousins. Not all of them live in Fire country, though, so I don’t see them often.”

“That’s still lucky. I wish I had cousins.”

Sasuke lets the conversation drift over him for a while. He’s almost calm, watching mosquitoes fluttering around the lanterns. The light is dying outside, and what little corner of the sky he can see is a stunning backdrop of pinks and blues.

They fall silent as their food arrives. Sasuke barely feels hungry, but he’s not nauseous either so he figures he might as well eat. He thinks it would be rude not to, although he can’t be sure. It’s been a long time since someone has tried to teach him etiquette.

He pushes whatever leftovers he has towards Naruto, who’s still eating like a man possessed. The other boy pauses, watching him warily for a moment, before taking the offered plate and curling his shoulders around it.

Sasuke feels his chest resonate with a pang of – something. He doesn’t want to look at it too closely, so he doesn’t.

Once they’re done and they have called for dessert – even Sasuke, who knows he’ll probably foist it off on Naruto as soon as he’s able, because the other two already had and he doesn’t want to stand out any more than he already does – he figures this is as good of a time as any.

He pulls the papers out of his pocket, carefully pushing each one towards his teammates. They look at him in askance – well, Sakura looks politely curious, Naruto looks like he’s seriously contemplating having his head checked – and, right. Here comes the hard part. Words.

“Kakashi gave these to me”, he says, which… doesn’t explain anything at all, apparently.

“Why would Kakashi-sensei give you random bits of paper?”, Naruto asks bluntly, face darkening with something that looks suspiciously like envy. Sasuke should probably be offended, but, this time, Naruto’s lack of a filter is more relieving than anything else.

Sasuke grips the opening like a lifeline. “They’re chakra-sensing papers. You use them to discover your chakra’s nature affinity.”

Sakura’s mouth falls open in wonder, obviously recognizing the description. Her hands dart out to clutch her piece of paper like it’s a piece of great treasure, and Sasuke feels another pang of this yet-unnamed feeling. He pushes it away.

Naruto is skeptical, but willing to listen to Sakura’s much more detailed – and palatable – explanation.

“You just push your chakra into it”, Sakura says, and demonstrates. Her paper promptly turns to dirt. Naruto follows suit, and his paper gets slashed in half.

So that makes lightning, earth, and wind, respectively. Not a bad repartition, overall. His work done, Sasuke sinks back against his chair.

“What’s yours, anyway, teme?”, Naruto asks, unpleasantly close.

Sasuke, for a moment, entertains the thought of lying. Uchihas always have fire, and the fact that he doesn’t is – his own failure; a shame he’d rather keep private. But it’s a childish thought, one that bears no consideration, so he just shrugs past the lump in his throat and pulls his own paper out of his pocket, laying it on the table next to his teammates’.

“Huh”, Sakura says pensively, and Sasuke braces himself for it. But it doesn’t come. Instead, she says: “With your fire, that makes four out of five bases covered.”

Sasuke blinks. That was an unexpected kindness, on her part, not to comment. He feels rotten as soon as the thought crosses his mind, because Sakura has never given him any reason to think of her as cruel. “You could probably get a second nature transformation rather easily, too”, he says carefully. “You have the chakra control for it.”

She blushes, but is mercifully spared from commenting on Sasuke’s terrible attempt at a compliment by Naruto’s yelled: “What am I, rotten garbage?”

“Inside voice”, she snaps back immediately.

“You could, too, but it would be harder”, Sasuke just says in reply. “You have a lot more chakra than Sakura. That means you’d have to convert a lot more of it than her.”

Naruto blinks. “That’s the first thing you’ve ever said that makes sense”, he comments.

“And that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me”, Sasuke deadpans right back, because he’s too tired to overthink his words. Much.

Naruto throws his head back and _laughs_ , a loud, bright bark of a thing. It throws Sasuke off for a second, because while Naruto smiles plenty, he doesn’t remember ever hearing him laugh. “Oh my god”, he wheezes, “I got it now. You’re not an asshole, you’re just _shy_.”

Sasuke’s mouth falls open in offence. Sakura chokes on something that may or may not be a laugh. Naruto, however, is not done. “Oh, sorry”, he says, grin bright and utterly unrepentant. “I guess you could still be both.”

Sasuke lunges for his throat, Sakura throws a punch somewhere into the fray, and, long story short, this is how Team 7 gets banned from its first restaurant. It will not be the last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, I am extremely sleep-deprived, my country is back in quarantine and everything sucks, so have a light-hearted chapter where Character Development happens. I also cut my palm open on a rusty iron nail (don't ask), so if I never show sign of life ever again, assume I forgot to get my tetanus shot. 
> 
> Your comments are all deeply appreciated. I hope everyone's doing alright out there.


	4. Hiraeth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I post the last chapter three days ago? Yes. Are my creative juices flowing? Yes. Am I sleeping? No.

Over the years, Sasuke has spent many a night gazing upon the cracks in his ceiling, so much so that he’s perfected it almost to an art form. He follows the river-like curve of the plaster and feels his thoughts ebb and flow in time with his breaths even as the world grows hazy around the edges.

Some nights, his heart beats rabbit-fast, and his brain starts running away from him, working through the day faster than Sasuke can follow, carding through each interaction and cataloguing every way he’s messed up, filing it away with the rest of his ever-growing pile of failures.

Other times, he can make his mind go blissfully blank, the cracks rising and falling like the moon waxes and wanes, and it’s almost like resting. There are a million and one thoughts knocking at the door, pounding and screaming and aching, but Sasuke lets his eyes go hazy and thinks _not today, not today_.

Kakashi materializing into existence in the middle of his bedroom, however, is a new one.

Six kunai-shaped holes in the drywall later, Kakashi blinks with exagerated laziness, says “Your reaction time really is terrible”, and promptly throws him out the window.

It is, Sasuke thinks even as he plummets down with a shower of glass, already shaping up to be one of those days.

During the dreaded bell test, Sasuke hadn’t fought Kakashi head-on. He had done his very best, in fact, to avoid this particular scenario – mostly because he knew he stood no chance in a close-quarters fight with a jounin. Now, though, Kakashi doesn’t give him the time and space to retreat and regroup – and if Sasuke needed to be reminded of the dreadful gap in skill between them, the fact that the man refuses to give him any breathing room this time around would do it.

For a while, Kakashi keeps pushing him into increasingly inescapable corners; when, by some miracle, Sasuke manages to get out of range of his taijutsu, he always has a ninjutsu technique ready to reel him back in. Sasuke keeps narrowly dodging his way out of danger and barely has time to think _This isn’t working_ , but he doesn’t put two and two together until Kakashi calls a water dragon up from the depths of the river.

Sasuke almost stops for a moment. She is stunning, even in the pale sliver of moonlight, sharp-fanged and fierce, with a long body of flowing water and diffracted light. Sasuke hasn’t seen a piece of ninjutsu like this since before his family died, when Uncle Kyoguku would sometimes exhale dragon fire that would dance around the campfire, making the shadows jump alive.

Sasuke isn’t a very good shinobi but even he knows one doesn’t get distracted in the middle of a fight because his opponent’s jutsu are _pretty_ , of all things, so he ruthlessly crushes the part of him that sat up in wonder, and breathes out a grand fireball that meets the dragon in a cloud of smoke and sizzling water.

 _Oh_ , he thinks, in the ensuing mist.

Sasuke slithers away in a low crouch, heart beating a heavy drum in his ears. Kakashi is ready for him, because of course he is, but this time, so is Sasuke. He springs into action before Kakashi can, launching a volley of shuriken at him and following close behind, feeling the impact travel down his arm when his kunai meets Kakashi’s – sword, yep, that is a full-ass sword.

Kakashi is still stronger and faster and smarter, but Sasuke is nothing if not stubborn, and he likes to think he makes the best of every minute opening he sees. Kakashi’s leaving them on purpose, he knows, but it isn’t until Kakashi counters a hit and turns it on him that Sasuke realizes that they’re not just fighting. Kakashi’s _teaching_ him.

He takes a moment to assess the situation. Kakashi is even holding himself differently, posture picture-perfect instead of his usual slouch. He’s fighting like Sasuke, he realizes, only subtly different.

Sasuke adjusts his grip on his kunai to match his, and leaps into the offensive, going into a feint-and-tackle that had him wheezing on the ground not ten minutes ago. Kakashi escapes it neatly, and then does it again, still subtly different, but now that Sasuke’s looking for it, he can spot the gaps.

He gets back up, adjusts his position once more to bridge the difference between the way Kakashi does it and his, between failure and success, and, for the first time that night, Kakashi’s eye crinckles into a smile.

(Sasuke might not be a very good student, but Kakashi is a brilliant shinobi and Uchihas are imitators at heart. For the first time, he thinks that maybe, maybe, he could drag himself across that chasm.)

“I”, Kakashi declares with great seriousness, “am so proud. So proud of my little Genin.”

Sasuke makes a derisive noise that’s mostly lost from lying face-down into the dirt. Team 7 usually gathers at eight am, even though Kakashi can generally be expected from somewhere between nine and twelve. It’s currently seven fifty.

Sasuke rolls his head just enough to take a look at the new arrivals – Sakura and Naruto, the lucky bastards. Sakura’s lip is still split from where Naruto got a lucky elbow in her face, but other than that, the two of them look fresh as daisies. Sasuke _loathes_ them.

(Sasuke takes careful note of how Naruto seems perfectly intact even though he went home with a rapidly-swelling cheek yesterday, and files it away with the rest of the weird inconsistencies about his teammate.)

“So proud”, Kakashi repeats. “Genin for barely three weeks, and already gotten into your first bar fight.”

Sakura looks crestfallen. She probably thinks Kakashi’s angry about it, stickler for the rules that she is. Sasuke’s personal opinion is that Kakashi either finds the thing hilariously entertaining, or (rightfully) pinned the blame on Sasuke and already exorcised his anger by beating the stuffing out of him by moonlight.

It’s a toss-up, really.

“Does it count as a bar fight if it was a sushi bar?”, Naruto pipes up to Sakura’s left – way out of punching range, Sasuke notes approvingly. Turns out the boy can learn, thank the gods.

“Pssht, technicalities”, Kakashi dismisses with an airy wave of his hand. Kakashi would make a terrible lawyer. “That doesn’t matter. What does matter, however”, he adds, pausing for dramatic effect, “is that no good deed goes unpunished!”

Sakura blinks slowly. Sasuke can almost see her mental struggle to accept the fact that Kakashi, in his own weird brand of logic, considers committing a minor crime as something worthy of praise. “Is that why you’re on time today?”, she asks, with something like disbelieving awe colouring her voice. Sasuke gives her a dead stare. “Or, err, early?”, she squeaks, finally taking in Sasuke’s… everything.

Sasuke tries glaring harder, but since he’s still lying on the ground where Kakashi dropped him like an unruly kitten, he’s not sure it works. He’s still wearing pajamas, but only the bottom half, because his shirt was the unfortunate casualty of a trap. Other than that, he is bruised, battered, and faintly charred, on top of being soaked and filthy.

 _Say anything, I fucking dare you_ , he says with his eyes alone. Naruto chortles. Sakura schools her face into something appropriately commiserating, because she is smarter than all of them combined.

Kakashi claps his hands together. “As a recompense”, he starts, even as Sakura mouths the word _recompense_ incredulously, “you are all going to learn a jutsu today!”

Naruto, predictably, loses his shit.

Sakura speaks up over the hysterical screaming, still looking like Christmas has come early: “What kind of jutsu, Kakashi-sensei?”

Kakashi – Kakashi straight-up _preens_ under the attention, what the fuck. He goes through hand signs with a flourish, and two clones pop into existence beside him. Real shadow clones, like the stupidly overpowered ones Naruto can make.

“Each of you will learn a different jutsu, according to your nature affinity”, says the first clone. “Sakura, with me.”

“And Naruto, you’re with me”, the second clone adds.

For a moment, nobody moves. Sasuke looks up to see Naruto and Sakura looking at him with a weirdly blank look on their face. He blinks.

Kakashi throws a bundle at his head. “And you, get dressed, shameless.”

Finding out that Kakashi has been rummaging through his clothes is only slightly less creepy than finding him in his bedroom in the dead of the night. Sasuke seriously considers telling him that, right up until the man reveals that he’s about to teach him how to turn his kunai into lightning whips, and Sasuke wisely decides that common decency can take a backseat to playing with sharp, shiny things.

“It’ll be good practice if you ever want to pick up a sword”, Kakashi says, like he doesn’t know Sasuke has been contemplating stealing his sword ever since he’s seen it. “And in the meantime, it’ll give you some much-needed reach.”

Sasuke squints at him. “Did you just call me short”, he says, too inflexionless to come out as a question. Kakashi answers it anyway.

“Short _and_ skinny. Now chop chop, this jutsu won’t learn itself.”

Unsurprisingly, Kakashi’s teaching style is very hands-off. He gives very little instructions and even less guidance, beyond demonstrating the jutsu once and then flopping down into the grass with his book back in his hand.

Sasuke doesn’t mind that much. He likes working through problems on his own, the result of a lifetime training alone. There’s satisfaction, too, in working through a problem one strand at a time, and then finally – finally – unravelling the knot.

He’s never done lightning jutsus before, but it’s his primary affinity. It can’t be that much harder than katon jutsus.

… Yeah, keep telling yourself that.

He starts by going through the hand signs slowly. In time, Kakashi had said, he’d want to be able to do them one-handed, to save time by already having his weapon in the other hand, but Sasuke isn’t stupid enough to think he’ll get it right on the first time.

Ram, boar, snake – his hands seize and lightning archs gracefully upwards for a moment, buzzing with static before fading away. The back of his teeth feel fuzzy. Sasuke blinks in shock.

“Less chakra, Sasuke”, Kakashi calls from his reclining position, not even looking up. Sasuke doesn’t even react to the taunt, because –

It took him weeks to learn how to get a katon going. Many more weeks, before he refined it into something usable. All the time, the weight of his father’s disappointment felt heavy on his shoulders, and somewhere along the way, he’d learned to accept that ninjutsu would never come easily to him.

He focuses inwards, and calls a flame into his palm. He snuffs it out with a fist, and when he uncurls his fingers it takes barely a thought for lightning to spring to life between his fingers, bright and joyful and tingling.

Ram, boar, snake, _tiger_ – his hands flare blue and he grips a kunai before he can lose his hold on the jutsu.

It comes alive with a crackle and a spark, coiled tightly in the summer air, shimmering and flaring, like a cobra before it strikes, and Sasuke –

Sasuke has never been _good_ at anything before. Not right off the bat, anyways; everything he has going for him, he’s had to fight for. Everything he did was measured in terms of _Itachi did it better_ , and that was – fair, in a way, because Itachi was brilliant and Sasuke is barely average. Itachi mastered the Grand Fireball in a day and Sasuke did it in two months; Itachi was ANBU at ten and Sasuke is just a Genin; Itachi made the clan proud and Sasuke couldn’t even give them a proper funeral. And Sasuke doesn’t mind that, not really; it would be like minding that the sky is blue or that the sun rises. It’s just the way the world is, that Sasuke will have to earn each and every one of his victories by the skin of his teeth. It’s just –

Somewhere along the way, he forgot what it was like, to succeed at something without going through this whole, gruelling process of trying and failing and trying again (because he is the boy who dies and wakes up and dies and wakes up –). It’s just –

It’s nice, is all.

Kakashi looks up and says: “Could be better”, but he’s smiling, and so Sasuke almost thinks _maybe, maybe_. 

They spend the rest of the day perfecting their new jutsu. Or, well, Sasuke plays around with how much chakra output he can get away with before the whip starts spasming out of control. His teammates, however, have a much more… colorful experience.

Kakashi’s teaching Sakura the technique he used on Naruto during the bell test, which, as far as Sasuke understands, involves a lot of crawling around underground. Still, Sakura seemed grimly determined, up until she realized that orienting one’s self while blind, deaf and buried under several meters of rock was much, _much_ harder than anticipated.

She gets stuck a grand total of five times – not counting the time she understimated how deep she was and burst out a good five meters away from her target, covered in dirt and squinting at the light, looking for all the world like a particularly incompetent groundhog. Sasuke’s favorite is still the time she forgot which way was up and tried desperately to get out by digging down instead of _up_. He will take her anguished wailing to the _grave_.

If Sakura’s struggling, she at least has a decent enough grasp on the core concept of “making the earth move where you want”, even if she’s a little shaky with it, resulting in some involutry landslides.

Naruto, however.

It’s not chakra that’s the problem, Sasuke reflects, because the boy has enough to power a small army. It’s that he has no idea how to channel it, even with the help of handsigns. As far as he understands, Naruto is supposed to be learning how to spit bullets made of highly-compressed air.

What he’s actually doing is sneezing great bursts of wind across the training ground. Coincidentally, Kakashi’s hair has never looked better.

“Oh, wow”, said man says as Naruto puffs out his cheeks and blows out a giant rasberry that makes a great oak tree topple over with an agonized groan. “Oh, wow, this is bad”, he says again.

Sasuke glares up at him even as the tree lands with a thud that makes the ground tremble. “You tell me”, he mutters, “you’re the teacher here.”

“I didn’t think it would be like that!”, Kakashi defends, looking vaguely haunted. “Aren’t you supposed to learn how to mould chakra at the Academy?”

Sasuke closes his eyes in a bid for patience. “Mould it, yes”, he says, teeth aching with how hard he’s gritting them. “Channel it, no.” It’s true; Sasuke is the only one with experience with ninjutsu outside of the Academy basics, and it’s only because he was a clan kid. But Sakura is civilian-born and Naruto is an orphan; to them, this is their first foray into elemental manipulation.

“Okay”, Kakashi mutters, “okay, I can fix this.” Sasuke would feel bad for him, he really would, but he distinctly remembers him throwing him into a pond this very morning, so he’s not feeling very charitable right now.

Kakashi claps his hands together, and his clones disperse with a pop. “Alright, children”, he calls out cheerily. “Change of plans! Why don’t you go request some D-ranks at the mission desk, and I’ll – go prepare the next lesson. Yes. That.”

Sasuke changed his mind. There is no universe in which he would feel bad for this man.

There is only one available D-rank. They agree to never speak of the demon cat mission again.

Sasuke goes home and he eats dinner and doesn’t throw it back up, and under the soothing drone of the TV he thinks about lunch break, about how they’d all collapsed into an exhausted pile of limbs. Sakura had started giggling, high and shrieking and graceless, and when he’d turned to look she had grinned a gummy smile that didn’t leave any room for coyness, and whispered: “I can do ninjutsu”, like the words themselves were precious. And then she’d clapped her hands together and sunk a few centimeters into the ground, giggling again. Naruto had puffed out his cheeks and blown a gust of wind that made the fallen leaves rise high, higher, spinning towards the sun, and he, too, was grinning, when he said: “See that, Sasuke?”

Sasuke hadn’t quite – smiled, but he thinks he might have been trying to. He had let lightning crackle between his fingertips, bright and blue and beautiful, and he’d thought, _maybe, maybe_.

It’s no good. He goes to sleep and he dreams of the dark and of his mother’s fingers, clawing at his face, his eyes, screaming with something hateful and desperate –

His father’s hand in his hair and around his throat, squeezing, hissing, _you are my greatest failure_ –

Of hands around his ankles, pulling him underwater ( _this is how Shisui died_ ), and he’s drowning, he is on fire and he _burns_ –

Uncle Yakumi saying _A man faces his death with his eyes wide open_ , and Sasuke peels back his heavy, swollen eyelids and there is Izumi and Misao and Uncle Kyoguku and Aunt Natsume and Akira and Tensei and everyone, floating gently between the reeds, their eyes hollowed out and their skin bloated a pallid grey, and the worst part is that they’re alive, they’re alive down there –

 _This is how you do it, Sasuke_ , his brother says gently and there is blood in his mouth on the sword and Itachi is dying – no, Sasuke is dying, he’s drowning again and again and again (the blood the fly the moon the sky) and his brother is dead but his eyes are alight in his face, swirling swirling swirling –

Sasuke wakes up to the scent of blood. He has bitten clean through his lower lip.

He is alone.

The next day, a man walks into the Hokage’s office, reeking of booze and fear, and Naruto lands them their first C-rank.

They leave for Wave on the morrow. Sasuke won’t say a word for another week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter today, but the pacing felt weird if I tried to cram any of the Wave arc in there, so I'm leaving it as it is. This chapter was honestly a joy to write, and I hope you guys like it as much as I do. 
> 
> Also, I went back to re-read to last chapter, and, oh boy, did I get my tenses confused there. Sorry about that, people.


	5. Wave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Comes in five years late with Starbucks] oh hey it's the Wave arc

Sasuke makes his first kill on the way to Wave.

It’s not even a conscious thought. One moment he’s seeing Kakashi get torn into pieces (kawarimi, part of his mind whispers, but it’s a distant thought, muted and breathless), and the next the perpetrator is dead with a kunai sticking out of his chest.

Sasuke doesn’t stop. There are two of them, and the second one has gone wild-eyed and screaming in the face of his – brother’s, he will know later, death. He can’t stop now, not when Kakashi is down and his teammates have frozen in place, white and terrified in a way he remembers being, a long time ago.

Sakura gets her shit together in time to knock their second opponent unconscious while Sasuke is distracting him, which shouldn’t surprise him as much as it does. Kakashi comes sauntering out of the woods as she sinks down on her heels, and Sasuke turns away when her face twist into something raw and desperate, trying to give her the illusion of privacy as she retches noisily. He settles for giving Hatake a meaningful look – he traumatized them by pretending to die in front of them, he deals with the fallout. Sasuke goes to secure their prisoner instead.

When Sasuke looks at the dead man, he thinks he ought to feel _something_. People always feel some type of way about their first kill; it’s practically a rite of passage. Everyone has a story about their first kill, from the horrifying to accidental and even strangely mundane. He’s heard it all, both from his family when he was young and then from his Chuunin instructors at the Academy. There’s a spectrum of emotions he could be feeling right now, from remorse and disgust and terror to exhilaration. By all accounts, he has all the tools to deal with them.

He feels empty instead.

He crouches down and retrieves his kunai, wiping it clean on the man’s jacket. The only shocking thing about it all, he thinks, is how _easy_ it was, although it really shoulnd’t have surprised him. Sasuke, after all, is intimately familiar with how easily bodies break.

The man doesn’t look that intimidating up close. He has a dark smattering of freckles on his nose and a jagged scar on his right hand. He looks like Izumi, and Auntie Natsume, and all of the others. He looks like a person, really. He has a brother, too, one that’s right there, and who will have to live with the grief of losing his kin, if they don’t kill him themselves.

But Sasuke knows grief, too, knows it down to the marrow of his bones; it has outlined his life in striking red, and now he finds that he can’t make himself feel any more of it. Sasuke feels hollow, like whatever feeling should have risen then and now had been scooped out of him. It’s not even the distant, fuzzy emptiness that comes riding on the heels of terror. There’s just… nothing there. Only the smelly, human-soft reality of a corpse, and Sasuke, still breathing. The man tried to kill him, and now he’s dead. Sasuke is alive. There is nothing else to it.

“That was unnecessary”, Kakashi says from somewhere behind him. Sasuke half-turns to look at him. His sensei is standing ramrod-straight, his lone eye unreadable. There is a dark patch on his sleeve where it looks like Sakura may have thrown up on him a little, but he’s otherwise perfectly unruffled. There is a moment there, when Sasuke looks up at him, large and looming and condemning, where he almost allows himself to hate him, because there is a wild, wild thing in Sasuke, something wounded and angry and starving that looks at the world in shades of danger, and who thinks _How dare you judge me for saving myself_.

 _Unnecessary_ , he said, like he hadn’t just faked his death for shits and giggles, like he hadn’t put his own student under a Genjutsu just to prove a point. Like he had any sort of high ground, here.

Which is about when Sasuke’s higher brain functions starts kicking into gear again, and he undertsands, with a flush of shame, that it was a test, because _of course it was_. It’s Hatake Kakashi. Everything is a test.

And, once again, Sasuke failed it. Because of course he did.

 _That was unnecessary_ means: you overreacted. It means: we could have had two hostages to question, and now we only have the one. (Picture this: your own father, large and looming and condemning. Hear this: you fail to meet my expectations once again.)

Sasuke’s mouth ticks down, but he doesn’t allow himself to duck his head. He is an Uchiha. He won’t hide from his mistakes. “Understood”, he manages to reply. He wants to add _I won’t do it again_ , but refrains. It was bad enough to overreact against their opponent. He won’t add insult to injury by acting like a scolded child.

Kakashi runs his hand through his hair. “Alright”, he says, palm pressed over his eye. “Alright.”

Interrogating their hostage goes smoothly enough, mostly because Sasuke wisely stands back and lets the rest of his team handle it. Naruto, he notes absently, is oddly good at weaseling information out of people. The man spills his entire life story in front of his earnest kindness, and Sasuke can’t even bring himself to shake his head at his teammate’s strange charisma.

The world feels oddly blank. He thinks of dead eyes and warm blood sluicing between his fingers as his nails dig half-moons into his palms. He thinks of the easy give of a body under a knife. He thinks of grief, this wild, mad thing death welds onto them all like a brand.

He doesn’t think of Tsukiyomi at all.

Kakashi is firmly against completing the mission. He doesn’t say it out loud, but the way he sticks close to Sasuke is clear enough: he thinks he’s a liability.

Naruto wants to complete the mission – not out of professional pride, but because he genuinely wants to help Tazuna, the bleeding heart that he is. Years ago, Sasuke would have meant it as an insult. He knows better, now.

Sakura doesn’t have much of an opinion; or if she does, she’s too intimidated to voice it. She’s still shaken from the earlier attack – both of his teammates are, he thinks, but while Naruto seems to deal with fear by barreling on ahead, Sakura is of a much more cautious variety, in the way people get when they have been burned once and aren’t very eager to repeat the experience. But Sasuke can also see that she’s compartmentalizing, and fast; and if nothing else he can respect someone who can be afraid and still _think_.

What it comes down to, really, is a war between her kindness and her self-preservation.

Sasuke can’t bring himself to care one way or the other.

“His people are _starving_ ”, Naruto insists, emphasis strong, and Sasuke can see Kakashi repress a wince. Naruto’s an orphan, too, but unlike Sasuke, he didn’t have the benefit of being the dearly beloved last remaining member of a founding clan. Worse, people seem to actively dislike him – whether it’s because of his frankly rather obnoxious pranking habit, or if it predates it, is ultimately irrelevant, because in any case Sasuke wouldn’t be surprised if he went hungry more often than not.

“His lying has put us all in danger”, Kakashi almost snaps, eye catching on Sasuke for a moment. He just looks back steadily.

“I _know_ that!”, Naruto replies in kind. He, too, is pretending not to look at Sasuke. “But what other choice did he have? Just let his people die without doing anything?”

“He could have petitioned the Hokage with a truthful request, for one.”

Naruto scoffs at that, and it’s such a strange sound that Sasuke startles out of his trance. “Like the Hokage would risk being seen as interfering in foreign affairs”, he says, with a surprising amount of insight. But he seems to realize Kakashi won’t be swayed by sentiment, so he switches gears. “Look, I’m not saying what he did wasn’t wrong. What I’m saying is that if we do complete the mission, it will give Konoha significant political leverage over Wave; we would have done them a favor for basically free, and the Hokage can claim ignorance until the last possible moment. It’s a win-win.”

“Assuming we don’t all die in the process”, Sakura pipes up. Naruto glares at her, but she stands her ground. “We already know this Gato person has the means to hire shinobi. I agree with you, Naruto, I really do, but all of this will be for nothing if we just get killed. It could even make things worse for Tazuna.”

“Send for backup.”

All of them startle, and it takes Sasuke an embarassingly long time to realize he’s the one who spoke up. Absurdly, he wishes he could snatch the words out of the air, put them back safely behind his teeth.

But he’s not a child anymore, so he squares his shoulders against his team’s attention and elaborates: “We send word back to the village that the mission went up in rank, and ask for a competent squad to be sent to assist and possibly take over. Until then, we keep guarding Tazuna, but adapt our plans for hostile shinobi.”

When Sasuke started talking, he was aiming his words at his teammates; towards the end, however, he was talking directly to Kakashi, well aware he’s the one he needs to convince.

(He doesn’t care about Tazuna and his people. Not really. He doesn’t think he has it in him, anymore, to care about what are basically strangers. Even his teammates, whom he sees practically every day, feel distant and foreign in a way he can’t quite describe.

But he thinks of going back to Konoha, with her towering faces and spindly trees, in his small, dark bedroom with cracks in the ceiling and blood on his pillow, with nothing to show for it but a dead man in a scroll, and it feels – wrong.

It’s not quite pride, he thinks, but – close, maybe. Enough to matter, in the end.)

Kakashi sinks back on his heels, looking over the three of them carefully. “Who’s in favor of this plan?” All three of them raise their hand. “If”, he says, “and that is a big if; if I agree to this, you will do exactly as I say, the moment I say it. No heroics, no wandering off. If I tell you to run, you run. Even if it looks like I’m going to die, you will run. Understood?”

All three of them nod somberly. Naruto’s knuckles have gone white around the fabric of his pants.

“Alright”, Kakashi says. He opens his eye to pin them all with a glare. “If any of you disobeys these orders, I swear to god you will be confined to the village until the day you make chuunin. For fuck’s sake”, he mutters, looking tired, but rising to his feet, calling to Tazuna: “Well, my friend, looks like it’s your lucky day!”

They cross the border to Wave in eerie silence. The whole trip has been silent, ever since they were attacked, but there is a different quality to the silence here. It’s the mist, Sasuke thinks, rising above the water, blanketing the world in a field of white, heavy quiet.

Sasuke grew up in Fire country; he grew up in the redwoods surrounding Konohagakure, with their towering Hashirama trees, dappling the world in shades of green and brown and gold. Here, however, everything is cool and colorless in a way that feels almost alien. The gallets rolling under their feet are gray, the sea is black, the sky is white. Even their rabbits are white, eyes an artic, intelligent blue.

Sasuke stares at the spot the animal disappeared off to, unease crawling up his spine. He tries not to let it show. 

Tazuna arranges their passage across with an old man with white eyes and a rickety boat, and even as they board Sasuke can’t help but think of a story his uncle used to tell him as a child, of a skeletal creature in the shape of a man taking the departed across a screaming river and into the realm of the dead. In the story, the souls can gain entry for the price of one gold coin, but if they cannot pay, the gatekeeper will leave them on the river bank, pushing his bark away while the river rises up to devour them. And that’s why, his uncle would tell him, some people still bury their dead with a gold coin stuck between their teeth; so they can pay the toll and not spend and eternity screaming and frothing in the river.

Sasuke tries not to think of it when they board the boat with their silent guide. He tries not to think of it when the mist parts before them and there stands a giant scarecrow of a man, with a smile like knives and hollow, ravenous eyes.

He forgets about it when Kakashi pushes up his headband to reveal a Sharingan nestled there in his eye socket, because –

Sasuke is familiar with the acrid tang of betrayal. Betrayal feels like drowning under a grinning moon, like love and hurt crashing together with the screech of a crow, like lips mouthing the shape of the words _how could you, how could you_.

And Sasuke might not love Kakashi the way he had loved his brother (will never, ever love anyone the way he once loved Itachi), might not even trust him, really, when it comes down to it. But he thinks he might have _wanted_ to, had started, despite himself, to think – maybe.

But then again, maybe not.

Because Kakashi sat with him and ate with him and didn’t once mention the fact that he was carrying a piece of his family with him – he walked around with someone else’s eye under his headband for years and never _once_ –

But there’s no time for Sasuke to properly break down about this, not when Hatake is fighting Zabuza of the Mist and almost gets killed in the process, like the fool he is.

Hatake is – an eye thief, but he’s also their best line of defense, because Zabuza is terrifying in the way Itachi was terrifying; he is so far out of their league that it isn’t even funny anymore. Hatake is dying, but not dead, and Sakura and Naruto and Sasuke can still move, can still fight. Not Zabuza, not when there’s no possible chance they would survive the encounter when Hatake failed to defeat him, but Sasuke has spent years of his life planning around the need to defeat a threat much bigger than he is, and, here and now, it’s enough to give them an edge.

“Naruto”, he whispers, tilting his head a fraction. The orange blur at the edge of his vision moves in aknowledgement. “Is your Fuuton strong enough to blow the mist away?”

Sasuke swears he can almost _hear_ him grin. “You _bet_ it is”, he replies in a whisper. Sasuke can feel his own lips tug into an answering smile. His carefully-patched world is falling apart at the seams but there is a battlefield before him and the thrum of his blood in his veins, and Sasuke is angry and terrified but the world is alive with the blood-red of Sakura’s dress and the stark blue of Naruto’s eyes, and this, impossibly, feels _right_.

Sasuke grins.

Their plan, when it comes together, is thus: Naruto burps out a large gust of wind that pushes the mist a good few hundred meters down the river, clearing the field in one inelegant, but unarguably effective, move. Behind him is one of his clones, disguised as Sakura and ostensibly guarding Tazuna. The real Sakura is in Sasuke’s kunai pouch. Sasuke himself is hurtling towards Zabuza at high speed.

Sasuke takes a moment to mourn the loss of whatever remains of his survival instinct.

The plan is simple, and relies on two things: the fact that Zabuza doesn’t know Naruto can make shadow clones, and his willingness to drag the fight out to tourment Hatake. Two things that could be his undoing, if they play their cards right.

Sasuke ducks under the swipe of his sword and comes up to throw a handful of shuriken, barely enough to keep him off his hide. In the background, Hatake is screaming something. Sasuke doesn’t listen. After that, it’s a mad game of dodging and attacking just enough to keep Zabuza from suspecting anything, Naruto soon joining the fray, right up until Sasuke sees his opportunity and seizes it.

Zabuza dodges his kunai easily and lunges forward to cut Sasuke’s leg out from under him. His kunai lands solidly at Hatake’s feet, and Sasuke grins as he lets electricity crackle to life, covering the sound of Sakura dispelling her transformation technique. 

Out of the three of them, she has the best chakra control by far. It’s child’s play, for her, to disturb Zabuza’s chakra flow long enough for Hatake to come bursting out of his watery prison. Even as the world comes alive with blue light and the chirping of birds, Zabuza snarls with something wild and mad and terrible that Sasuke wishes he didn’t recognize but still _does_ , and the flat of his word catches him in the chest and sends him flying back and pummelling straight into the river.

Sasuke sinks into the water like a pebble in a pond, the world above turning to murky shapes, and he remembers once more –

A tall man in a bark and no gold to pay him with, and the river reaching up to drag you down and devour you whole, keeping you there where there is no light, only the defeaning silence of an eternity’s worth of screams.

Somehow, drowning still hurts, after all this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, yes, it's me. It's been a while, for a plethora of reasons, the most relevant one being that this chapter went through so many rewrites I don't even know what words are anymore. Real life has also been kicking me while I'm down, so that was fun too. 
> 
> I originally wanted to cram the entire Wave arc in one chapter, but I have realized that's just not happening, both because this one chapter would pretty much double the word count for this fic, and because that would mean trying to rush out the chapter when I wasn't entirely happy with it, so I'm cutting it up. One of the reason I wanted to post this is that it's exam season where I live, and I'm in my last year of undergrad, so for the sake of my sanity I wanted to finish this part so I could focus on not crashing and burning on the academic front. All of this to say: have this chapter as a holiday treat, this fic isn't abandoned even if the next chapter might take a while, and once again thank you all for the support. This sounds cheesy as hell but I'm incredibly glad to be able to share this with you all, so thank you again and I hope everybody's alright out there.


	6. Kindred

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for this chapter: mention of child prostitution and human trafficking.

Tazuna’s house smells like the sea.

All of it seems to be carved out of pale, creaking wood, from the doors to the bedframes, including even its occupants. Tazuna’s daughter is all knobbly spine and purpling fingers, skinny and quiet and watchful; the boy, in contrast, is defiantly loud, baby-blunt teeth bared with nameless hunger and something wretched and _angry_ lurking in the shrill notes of his voice.

They’re familiar, the both of them, strangers they might be. Fear, after all, has been Sasuke’s only constant for a great many years. It comes in all shapes and sizes, but he suspects it will always somehow feel like home, no matter the sound and taste of it.

There isn’t much time to get to know their hosts, at first, for obvious reasons – Kakashi is still dead to the world and Sakura bandages his injuries with trembling lips but steady hands. Sasuke does his best to spit the water out of his lungs, first on the riverbank and then in Tazuna’s bathroom sink, Naruto a flickering shadow at the corner of his eye. Sasuke doesn’t apologize, but he doesn’t scare his teammate away, either. He thinks it’s as good as he’s ever going to get.

Sasuke spends hours upon hours standing vigil at Kakashi’s bedside, looking out of the door and listening to the uneasy creak of the house. There is a hollow pit in his stomach, because while Sasuke hadn’t quite latched onto Kakashi like his teammates had – too wary, too angry, too much of himself in every way possible, really – and hadn’t quite trusted him, either, he had _wanted_ to. There had been a part of him that had somehow survived both his father and Itachi, some flickering ember of childishness that had started to bloom to life, letting himself think that perhaps, perhaps, Kakashi was someone worth following.

But now, the thought makes his stomach curl. _What a fool you are_ , he thinks, tired and bitter, because while he was tying himself into knots trying to fit himself into the life that had somehow become his, Kakashi was. Was walking around with a dead person’s eyeball attached to the inside of his skull, like it was normal, like it wasn’t even worth _mentioning_ –

Every time Kakashi had shown up late and unapologetic, there was a living part of Sasuke’s dead kin under his headband, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. Sasuke was raised a shinobi. He is no stranger to absolute moral bankruptcy, but there is a _reason_ why people shy away from Doujutsu theft, even among their profession, and there is something particularly abhorrent about the thought of Kakashi being the one doing it – doing it to one of Sasuke’s _kin_.

That man did the worst thing you can ever do to an Uchiha and he is right there, dead to the world and defenceless. By Clan law, Sasuke should strike him right there and then. He _should_. He has to.

Sasuke has never been a very good Uchiha. He sits at Kakashi’s bedside and recites the rites, hope like cold embers in his mouths. He hates Kakashi, just a little bit, but he remembers being six and holding his dead mother’s hand in the darkness, and he knows –

He will have to be the one to put his brother to rest, one day. He will lay him down and let him burn away, and that will be the end of the Uchiha Clan. Sasuke can, if not live with that thought, then at least survive it long enough to see it to its end.

Sasuke knows all that, knows the agonizing weight of duty and love and hate that it carries. But for all that Kakashi’s existence hinges on much of the same burden, Sasuke also knows that he will not be able to burn Kakashi, because Sasuke feels like the barest stub of a match, like there is so little of him remaining that the flame is already licking his fingers. Whoever he sets alight, he will burn with.

When Kakashi wakes, he waits until Naruto and Sakura are done wailing and screaming, respectively, before saying: “I assume you have questions.”

Sasuke just looks at him for a moment. Kakashi looks back steadily. He looks like hell, even with his mask on; what little of his skin shows is grey and sallow, and his hair has gone flat and greasy with sweat and sickness.

But there is steel in his not-so-lone eye, and Sasuke wonders, briefly, how it would feel, to be able to stand on death’s door and still hold yourself proud.

“Who was it?”, he asks, and, for one, is absurdly grateful that his voice is still as flat as it always is.

Kakashi doesn’t break eye-contact when he answers. Maybe, if he was a better person, Sasuke could respect him for that. “Uchiha Obito. My teammate in the third war. He was your –“

“I know who he was”, Sasuke interrupts him evenly, although there is a wealth of anger beneath his throat. Obito was his uncle, his father’s yougest half-brother. Sasuke isn’t a very good Uchiha, but he _remembers_ his kin.

Kakashi is tense and still on the bed, which ought to hurt, with his injuries. But Sasuke doesn’t know how to diffuse the tension; doesn’t know if he even wants to. It will occur to him, later, that this was the first time he ever saw Kakashi nervous, and it didn’t even register past the numbness.

“Right. I want you to know – I didn’t steal it. He – it was a gift. He gave it to me. Before he died”, Kakashi blurts out in one long, staccato breath, as if eager to get the story out. And maybe he is, Sasuke thinks; maybe it doesn’t matter to him, and he just wants Sasuke to leave him alone so he can go back to sleep.

It might not matter to Kakashi, but it matters to Sasuke, so he says: “A gift you harvested from his cooling corpse.”

Kakashi flinches for real this time, and Sasuke should feel good about it, should feel validated in his anger. He feels like he’s drowning instead.

“I did”, Kakashi swallows, “and I have regretted it every day since then.”

 _This_ manages to break through the fog. Sasuke can feel his lips curl into a sneer before he can stop himself. “Regretting it is useless. You shouldn’t have done it, but you have; and now you would insult him further by hiding his eye like it’s something to be _ashamed_ of.”

Kakashi draws himself up at that, and Sasuke thinks vaguely that he may have managed to truly offend the man, this time. “Your _clan_ ”, he snarls, “wanted to rip it from my skull every time they saw it.”

There is chakra building in the room, alight with static, and Sasuke remembers Kakashi standing his ground against the most terrifying man he’s ever seen, short of Itachi. Kakashi could kill him, easy as breathing.

Sasuke bares his teeth, and stands his ground. There are things worth fighting over. “You would blame them?”, he replies in kind. “You keep part of Obito alive when he is dead. They have – had all the right to hate you for it.”

“You’re not making sense”, the man says, frustratedly. “One moment you tell me I shouldn’t be ashamed of it; the next you tell me it is something to be ashamed of.”

“You should be ashamed”, Sasuke says. “Of what you did. But not of the eye. If – if you’re telling the truth, and it was a gift, then Obito loved you enough to find you worthy of it.”

Kakashi curls into himself. He looks ridiculous, this tall scarecrow of a man, sitting up in bed and shrinking up, as if shielding himself from a blow. “Obito didn’t love me”, he says, finally, weakly, and Sasuke scoffs.

“He did”, he replies, merciless. “He did, or he would never have done what he did.”

Kakashi stays silent for a long time. “When I came back”, he says finally, “your uncle took me in. Uchiha Kyoguku.” He speaks the name with great care, as if tasting for the first time in many years. Sasuke understands. It’s the first time he’s heard any of his family’s name since they died, and it does unpleasant things to his stomach. “He’s the one who taught me how to use the Sharingan, and not kill myself while doing it. Not that I’m doing a very good job of it”, he tacks on carelessly, waving his hand around.

Sasuke tilts his head. “Against the clan’s wishes?”, he clarifies, not surprised in the least when Kakashi nods. Uncle Kyoguku was always an inmovable mountain of a man, up until the day he died, and Obito was his brother, too.

Sasuke sits back and considers him. “Did he tell you about the rites?”, he asks.

Kakashi nods again. “Not everything”, he says, looking up quickly, as if Sasuke’s about to get offended. He should have, but Sasuke’s tired. Their traditions were meant to be kept secret from outsiders, but the clan was dead and their traditions had died with them. Sasuke has no use for those secrets, not when it’s only him, and even he’ll be dead soon.

“But enough?”, he asks, even though it hurts like a ragged, bloody thing, because that is the one duty Sasuke will not shirk from carrying out: putting his kin to rest.

“Enough”, Kakashi replies. “Enough so that if I die, my body will be cremated. If anyone tries to remove the Sharingan post-mortem, it will self-destruct.” He hesitates, then. “Is that acceptable?”

Sasuke blinks. “It is”, he says. And then he adds, because the Clan is dead and there is only Sasuke and this man who carries half an Uchiha with him, now: “The important part is that the eye doesn’t remain. Fire is traditional as a means of destruction, but not a requirement.” Sasuke pauses, as something occurs to him. “How did you ensure the Sharingan would self-destruct?”

Kakashi gives him a long, unreadable look. “Here”, he says, and tilts his head sideways so that Sasuke can get a good look at the scarred side of his face. Sasuke can’t see it at first, but the flickering light catches on the edge of something that isn’t the sharp dip of his scar, and Sasuke leans closer. There is the pale latticework of a tattoo around his eye, oblong and white, nearly invisible against Kakashi’s skin. Sasuke doesn’t understand what they mean, but he recognizes the characters. It’s a seal.

“Oh”, he says. It’s impressive work. _Beyond_ impressive work. There’s a reason Fuinjutsu is mostly a lost art, beyond the basic, easy to replicate scrolls and tags. Sealing on a living being’s body is more than a little tricky, and just thinking about the math this seal must have required makes Sasuke’s head hurt in sympathy. “Who did this?”, he asks, voice hushed with reverence. _And can they do it for me?_ , he wants to ask.

“My sensei’s wife”, Kakashi replies in the same tone. Sasuke’s gaze flicks to his eyes, and there’s an undercurrent of grief there that’s far too familiar.

“She must have been brilliant”, Sasuke says, for once entirely genuine.

Kakashi’s lips twitch into something like a smile. “She was”, he agrees lowly. “Most brilliant woman I ever met.“ His smile widens minutely. “Terrible taste in men, though.”

Sasuke lets out a near-silent laugh, too surprised to repress it. But he recognizes it as Kakashi’s way to beg a way out of the heavy conversation topic, and so Sasuke lets him have it.

Things aren’t _alright_ , probably never will be, but – _It was a gift_ , Kakashi said, and for all his faults the man isn’t a liar. Sasuke will probably never look at his eye and feel anything but instinctive, bone-deep revulsion, but –

Somehow, somewhere, an Uchiha loved this man enough to forfeit their right to the afterlife for him. The least Sasuke can do is ensure he doesn’t die before his time.

Sasuke plans to do the exact same thing, after all.

They debrief the next morning, in the clearing a stone’s throw away from Tazuna’s house. Sasuke learns from his teammates that Zabuza most likely isn’t dead and has an accomplice, which is worrying. On the other hand, and by Kakashi’s own estimation, Zabuza shouldn’t be up and running before their own backup arrives, which is only slightly reassuring. Kakashi had sent the message with the Demon Brothers in mind, but Zabuza is a whole other league of dangerous; there’s no guarantee that whoever the village will send will fare any better against him.

“True”, Sakura says when Sasuke points that out, “but Kakashi-sensei would have been able to take him down if he didn’t have to worry about the three of us getting killed. It might only be a matter of giving us enough cover so that we won’t be dead weight.”

Naruto bristles at being called dead weight, but Sasuke isn’t done. “That’s not taking the accomplice into account”, he says. “They didn’t join the fight the first time for the sake of their cover, but not that it’s all but blown he most likely will, and we have very little clue about their skill level beyond the fact that they’re good enough to impersonate a hunter-nin.”

It’s oddly easier to talk when it’s about a mission, Sasuke thinks, and almost laughs when he realizes it’s more comfortable for him to be a soldier than a real person.

“Both of which are good points”, Naruto interrupts diplomatically, “but there may actually be a more straightforward solution.”

Even Kakashi looks interested at that, and after he makes a “go ahead” gesture, Naruto elaborates: “Our guys are missing-nin, but they’re not attacking us for the sake of it. Someone hired them to do a job, and they’re doing it. Take the employer out of the equation, however…”

“And they won’t have any more reason to risk their lives by attacking us”, Sakura breathes in understanding.

Sasuke squints at him. “Are you suggesting we murder a politician?”

“Slightly concerning that you jumped straight to murder, but no”, Naruto replies, looking, indeed, vaguely concerned. “Creating a power vacuum in the area could actually be counterproductive in the long run. Hence, blackmail.” He spreads his arms in a grand “ta-da!” gesture.

Kakashi snaps his book shut, and the three of them shut up and look at him expectantly. “We need to prepare for the worst case scenario”, he says, and before Naruto can deflate too visibly, he adds: “But Naruto is also right. Planning for the worst doesn’t mean we can’t be proactive and try to make a better scenario come to life.” Naruto beams. “However”, he says sternly, “we will not be caught unaware if it does break into a fight, and one that’s heavily rigged against us at that. Got it?”

There’s silence for a long, heavy moment. Then Naruto says: “You _are_ aware that the last time you used this tone with us, you were trying to tell us not to be heroes? You know, that time right before you went off to be a hero?”

Sasuke closes his eyes in mild despair. Sakura lets out a hissing breath between her teeth. Naruto, because he is an idiot, keeps cheerfully digging his own grave: “I mean, I’m not saying that your Serious Voice is a bad omen or anything like that, but you’ve gotta admit there’s some pretty serious causality there –“

Kakashi does no such thing. He does, however, let electricity flow through the damp grass while he explains the basics of tree-walking, like a demented version of the floor is lava.

Kakashi comes knocking on his door that evening, right after Sasuke decides he is mostly done picking twigs out of his hair. He’s ditched the crutches, something that’s bound to make Sakura erupt if she ever catches sight of him, and he somehow manages to look vaguely judgemental without moving a single muscle. It is, like many things Kakashi does, both impressive and infuriating. “Get dressed, we’re heading out”, he says.

Sasuke clicks his tongue, but complies wordlessly. They pad through the house in a silence that’s slightly uncomfortable by virtue of being shared by two people who don’t know each other nearly well enough to have any business knowing that much about each other, but it’s nowhere near the worst silence Sasuke has ever endured, so he lets it be. They don’t meet any of the house’s other inhabitants on the way out, and Sasuke doesn’t bother questionning why they’re not bringing Naruto and Sakura. They’re not exactly suited for stealth. Sakura’s hair is _pink_ , for god’s sake.

Kakashi leads them into the town proper. Sasuke hasn’t gotten a good look at it until now, too busy trying to keep Kakashi alive long enough to get him to something vaguely related to medical attention. But it isn’t until they’re walking through the muddy streets that he remembers that, for all intents and purposes, Konohagakure is uncommonly wealthy.

People don’t starve on the streets, back there. Abject poverty is still a thing, of course it is, but even then being homeless in Fire country, where it rarely gets below freezing temperature, is very different than being homeless in Wave, where Sasuke suspect dying of cold is a very legitimate concern.

Across the road, a woman is closing a tailor’s shop. When she smiles at something her neighbor says, he sees her mouth is only dotted with teeth. Her face is pallid and clammy-looking. She looks to be in her thirties.

A few streets away, a child’s silhouette is backlit by a flickering fire. It looks almost unreal, for a moment, then, sticklike everywhere except for his belly, which sits potruding and bloated.

Even if the town sold everything it had and then some, it likely still wouldn’t have had enough money for an A-rank mission. No wonder, then, that Tazuna was willing to risk short-changing a ninja village, with all the grisly consequences it usually implies. He had no other option.

The further they walk, the darker the streets get, lights winking out as the streets get dirtier, narrower – but not quieter, Sasuke notes, not with a man’s fevered mumbling and few houses away and the tap-tap-tap of a prostitute’s heel against the stone. Her makeup ages her a decade, but under her sleeves her hands betray her, soft and pale and unwrinkled.

Their destination ends up being something that looks like several houses stitched together, heavy and squat. Kakashi motions for silence, and starts walking up the side of a nearby building.

Figures the man would teach him something because it would end up serving his own ends. Fucking typical. 

“What do you think?”, Kakashi asks as they make their way back to Tazuna’s house, the world going grey and colorless with the beginning of morning light. The glowing tip of his cigarette winks as he pulls on it with a sigh. Sasuke’s gaze lingers on it until his eyes ache, oddly hypnotized.

Sasuke hums. “Trafficking ring?”, he suggests. The chimeric-looking warehouse had been the theater of a lot of coming and goings in the dark hours of the night, a steady stream of people either depositing or picking up carefully-wrapped packages. They weren’t even trying very hard to hide it.

Kakashi makes a noncommital noise. “What else?”

Sasuke tries to organise his thoughts into something resembling order. “The men were sailors, for the most part”, he starts, and that much he is sure of. Sea-farers have distinctive body art. “And considering there isn’t much traffic here except by boat, I think we can safely say they’re smuggling the goods through the waterways. And…”

Sasuke trails off, frowning. Kakashi is a silent presence beside him, somehow both nerve-wracking and unobtrusive. “It’s a relatively new operation”, he says slowly. “They’re well-organised, because someone above knows what they’re doing, but the underlings themselves are new to this. They haven’t had time to hammer out the kinks yet.”

“What makes you think that?”, Kakashi asks, voice entirely neutral, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“The town, for the most part”, Sasuke admits. “They’re poor, but they didn’t use to be, or at least not that much. They were wealthy enough to afford a tailor, but now they aren’t anymore.” When things get rough, services that would be considered a luxury are the first to go. “The tailor shop is still open, but the woman at the counter had scurvy. Nobody’s buying anymore, and hasn’t been for some time, but not long enough for her to cut her losses and move, or die.”

“Could be that the town has just fallen on some hard times”, Kakashi suggests.

“Could be”, Sasuke shrugs. “But some of the smugglers were locals. Not necessarily from this town in particular, but they clearly weren’t professionals.”

“Not here by choice, you think?”, Kakashi asks sharply.

“Dunno”, Sasuke admits. “Might be coercition, might be that the only way to survive here nowadays is to run some not-so-legal jobs under the table. Whichever one it is, those guys aren’t criminals by trade.”

“No, they aren’t”, Kakashi agrees, voice like a steel-trap wrapped in silk, and Sasuke lets his tongue trace over the shape of his teeth, something hungry and insistent tugging at his insides. Easy, to forget that Kakashi is dangerous, with the way he slouches about, but the chakra hanging in the air is sharp enough to cut, and the hand he drops on top of Sasuke’s head could turn its grip to crushing in an instant.

It’s not kin, not really. But close. Close enough.

Sasuke’s chakra control is, overall, rather terrible.

It’s not as bad as Naruto’s, thank the gods for small mercies. But it’s nowhere near good either, especially not in comparison to Sakura, who is unsurprisingly brilliant at it. Sasuke hates it and hates himself for feeling envy clog his throat even as he recognizes it for what it is, because Sakura is a natural just like Itachi was a natural, and here Sasuke is, once again, falling behind.

It’s stupid. It’s stupid and petty and _mean_ , is what it is, because Sakura is his teammate and he is meant to support her, but jealousy grows in the hollows between his ribs all the same, like a patch of dandelions, and Sasuke can’t quite manage to pull it out by the roots.

He retreats instead. He bites down on his tongue to keep himself from saying anything he will regret, and tries to shape his face into something resembling pleasant neutrality. It doesn’t really work, he knows, but he thinks it’s still better his teammates think him churlish because he is wet and aching and tired than because he is _jealous_ , of all things. He leans into it. It helps that he is, in fact, all of those things. Everything in this shithole of a country is damp in some capacity, and he fears that should they linger for too long, he will forget what being warm and dry felt like. He has fallen off so many trees in the past week that the back of his neck has developed a permanent grass stain, and the glare of the sun on the water makes his eyes sting, eventually settling in a permanent, pulsating headache beneath his eyelids.

When night falls, Kakashi almost always comes by, and they head out to recon. Sasuke memorizes the schedules of some of their key players and writes them down at Tazuna’s kitchen table for Sakura and Naruto to pour over in the daytime. After a few nights, Kakashi starts leaving him to do it on his own and disappears on his own errands – tailing Gato himself, he realizes later.

Everything feels strange, misty and off-center. When he manages to snatch a few hours of sleep, Sasuke dreams of walking through a fog, gaze settling on something just out of his reach, and startles awake right before the world snaps into focus.

One evening, Sasuke escapes the mad rush of post-dinner cleanup by slipping through the door when Tsunami is busy berating Inari for dropping the cutlery. He doesn’t quite _object_ to the kid in the visceral way that Naruto and Sakura seem to do, but he’s still a loud, messy child who generally doesn’t do anything good for his frazzled nerves.

He blinks upon finding Naruto already outside, sitting cross-legged on the ground, twirling a flower between his fingers. He must have just come back from his evening walk. He, along with Sakura, has been banned from going into town, on account of being far too recognizable. (Sasuke privately thinks it has also something to do with the fact that they’re kids who wouldn’t recognize human trafficking if it punched them in the face. Either that, or _they_ would try to punch _it_ in the face.) Naruto and Sakura, predictably, did not take this well.

“Hey, Sas’ke”, Naruto greets dully, looking up with a small, tired smile. The moodiness looks wrong on him, but Sasuke doesn’t have anything to say that would make it any better. His fingers itch with the urge to rub at his eyes.

Sasuke sits down next to his teammate. He often wishes he had an easier time with words, but never more keenly than he does now, tongue feeling like lead in his mouth, constraining his thoughts to the confine of his own skull. How come, he wonders, that he can lay down his findings to Kakashi with military efficiency, pulling clues apart and putting them back together with ease, but cannot, for the life of him, manage small talk with a teammate? (How is that fair?, he wants to ask, like a child, like Inari is probably doing right now, and oh, doesn’t that comparison sting.)

“Alright?”, he manages, lamely, and resists the urge to shove his own fist down his throat in mortification.

Naruto hangs his head between his shoulder. His hands still on the flower, before he gives a short, mirthless laugh. “You know what? I don’t think I am”, he finally says, sounding both tired and defiant, which is so much like him that Sasuke almost smiles.

Sasuke is halfway through psyching himself into asking _What do you need_? when Naruto abruptly speaks again: “Do you think Kakashi-sensei hates me?”, he asks quietly, still and unmoving.

Sasuke blinks. And blinks again. After a moment’s thought, he blinks a third time, fruitlessly hoping that the question might make more sense this time around. “Why the fuck would he?”, he finally says, not bothering to mask his disbelief. Kakashi doesn’t do anything as crass as to pick favorites, but it’s quite obvious to anyone with eyes that he _adores_ Naruto and Sakura. Hell, he lets them sleep through the night; coming from him, that’s positively doting.

Sasuke never thought of his teammate as someone in possesion of much common sense in the first place, but that is a new low.

Naruto, however, is not privy to this particular train of thought, which is perhaps for the best, and so he continues, unbidden: “I got him hurt, though, didn’t I? Got you both hurt”, he adds in a murmur, sneaking a glance at Sasuke from beneath his eyelashes.

Sasuke shifts, uncomfortable. Out of all the members of Team 7, Naruto is usually the one with the better grip on his emotions; it’s jarring, to see him so unmistakebly shaken. “That’s – part of the job, isn’t it? Shinobi get hurt all the time, and we’re fine now.”

Naruto is shaking his head before Sasuke finishes his sentence. “I know that, I _get_ that. I hate that you got hurt, but I’m not mad that you did. It’s just – Kakashi-sensei was right, wasn’t he?”, he says, small and quiet, and so intrisically _wrong_ that Sasuke feels the urge to recoil. “It was pretty selfish of me to insist we continue the mission.”

“No”, Sasuke replies before his brain can catch up. He bites his tongue at Naruto’s questionning look, but refuses to take it back. Sasuke has spent a week creeping around the town’s rafters on soundless feet, which perhaps isn’t enough to grasp the full breadth of the misery the people there have to shoulder, but is long enough to get a pretty good idea of it anyways. “You were trying to help. You didn’t owe anyone anything, but you wanted to help anyways. You’re not – you’re never wrong for trying to do the right thing.”

“Trying”, Naruto repeats, softly. “But failing.”

Sasuke actually rolls his eyes at that. “So what?”, he says. “You tried, and you failed. Big deal. Just try again.”

Naruto shrinks into himself, looking like he’s trying to make himself a smaller target. His flower gets bunched in his clenching fist. “What if I was wrong, though?”

Sasuke graces him with an incredulous look. “Well, then you were wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. You can’t be telling me you’d rather not try at all than risk being wrong?”

Naruto stays silent for an unusually long time. “No”, he answers finally, fiddling with his flower again, trying to mooth its petals out. “But they do say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it”, Sasuke snaps.

Another silence. “I wanted to be a hero”, Naruto whispers. “I just – I wanted to be able to waltz in and help everyone and go home with a cool story, how stupid is that? I never thought – I just didn’t _think_.” He grips two handfuls of hair with his fists.

Sasuke mulls it over. “Maybe it _was_ selfish”, he says slowly, “in that you only saw what _could_ be done, and not what you could actually do. But doing the right thing for the wrong reasons doesn’t make it wrong.”

Naruto breathes out slowly. “Kakashi-sensei almost died.” Another look. “ _You_ almost died.”

Sasuke shrugs. “And if we hadn’t come, Tsunami and Inari and Tazuna and many others would have died. It’s not – “ The words stick in his throat, heavy and cloying, and he bites his lip in frustration.

Naruto waits him out. He can be strangely patient when he puts his mind to it, and somehow, somewhere, Sasuke’s many inane habits have registered as worth being silent over. Sasuke doesn’t let himsef feel grateful for it.

“If it was me”, Sasuke starts again, because words are hard to him at the best of times, but some things are worth fighting over and he _needs_ Naruto to understand this, “I would have turned back without a thought. I would have saved myself first and let those people rot, and I wouldn’t even feel bad about it.” A pause. “The fact that you didn’t – that you actively chose not to do that – that you didn’t value someone else’s life above your own – that’s important.”

Naruto’s eyes are wide and very, very blue. “I wanted to”, he whispers. “I wanted to turn back and keep you all safe so badly.”

Sasuke snorts. “You’re human”, he points out drily. “Of course you did. Look, I’m not saying you have to be some sort of – saint, or whatever. I’m just saying that – the fact that you had both options, and yet didn’t choose the path of least resistance – it matters. It matters more than you think.”

Naruto breathes out slowly, shaking his head. “I can’t believ I ever thought you were an asshole”, he says, à propos of nothing, but he makes no move to start fighting, so Sasuke lets himself relax. “It just – doesn’t feel like the right choice, I guess.”

Sasuke thinks of Kakashi, of Itachi, and swallows. “Sometimes”, he murmurs, “there is no right choice.” He thinks of being six and standing in front of a pyre and wishing he could lie down with the rest of his kin and burn, seven and holding a kunai to his chest and knowing, just knowing, that:

One day, maybe months or years from now, he will stand in front of his brother with a weapon in his hand and set him alight or die trying.

“Sometimes, you only get to choose between the terrible and the unspeakable.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello good people of the internet, it is slightly possible that this chapter is a bit of A Mess, but I have spent the past four weeks frantically cramming my head full of Knowledge and long story short I think there might be more caffeine in me than blood.
> 
> On a more related note, you guys seem to be enjoying Kakashi and Sasuke's awkward as fuck relationship as much as I am, and I am stupidly giddy about it.


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